DIVSocial history of Iranian cinema that explores cinema's role in creating national identity and contextualizes Iranian cinema within an international arena. The first volume focuses on silent era cinema and the transition to sound./div

In the fourth and final volume of A History of Iranian Cinema, Hamid Naficy looks at the extraordinary efflorescence in Iranian film and other visual media since the Islamic Revolution.

Social history of Iranian cinema that explores cinema's role in creating national identity and contextualizes Iranian cinema within an international arena.

Recent, post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has of course gained the attention of international audiences who have been struck by its powerful, poetic and often explicitly political explorations. Yet mainstream, pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, with a history stretching back to the early twentieth century, has been perceived in the main as lacking in artistic merit and, crucially, as apolitical in content. This highly readable history of Iran as revealed through the full breadth of its cinema re-reads the films themselves to tell the full story of shifting political, economic and social situations. Sadr argues that embedded within even the seemingly least noteworthy of mainstream Iranian films, we find themes and characterisations which reveal the political contexts of their time and which express the ideological underpinnings of a society. Beginning with the introduction of cinema to Iran through the Iranian monarchy, the book covers the broad spectrum of Iran's cinema, offering vivid descriptions of all key films. "Iranian Cinema" looks at recurring themes and tropes, such as the rural versus the 'corrupt' city and, recently, the preponderance of images of childhood, and asks what these have revealed about Iranian society. The author brings the story up to date explaining Iranian filmmaking after the events of September 11, from Mohsen Makhmalbaf's astonishing Kandahar to Saddiq Barmak's angry work Osama, to explore this most recent and breathtaking revival in Iranian cinema.

"Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, [this four-volume set] explains Iran's peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran."--Page 4 of cover.

An academically acclaimed and globally celebrated cultural critic, Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books and articles on Iran, Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art, among them Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future; Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (editor), Iran: A People Interrupted, and Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation. He lives with his family in New York City.

It is nearly impossible to separate contemporary Iranian cinema from the Islamic revolution that transformed film production in the country in the late 1970s. As the aims of the revolution shifted and hardened once Khomeini took power and as an eight-year war with Iraq dragged on, Iranian filmmakers confronted new restrictions. In the 1990s, however, the Reformist Movement, led by Mohammad Khatami, and the film industry, developed an unlikely partnership that moved audiences away from revolutionary ideas and toward a discourse of reform. In Reform Cinema in Iran, Blake Atwood examines how new industrial and aesthetic practices created a distinct cultural and political style in Iranian film between 1989 and 2007. Atwood analyzes a range of popular, art, and documentary films. He provides new readings of internationally recognized films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Time for Love (1990), as well as those by Rakhshan Bani, Masud Kiami, and other key Iranian directors. At the same time, he also considers how filmmakers and the film industry were affected by larger political and religious trends that took shape during Mohammad Khatami's presidency (1997-2005). Atwood analyzes political speeches, religious sermons, and newspaper editorials and pays close attention to technological developments, particularly the rise of video, to determine their role in democratizing filmmaking and realizing the goals of political reform. He concludes with a look at the legacy of reform cinema, including films produced under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose neoconservative discourse rejected the policies of reform that preceded him.

Abbas Kiarostami planted Iran firmly on the map of world cinema when he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival for his film A Taste of Cherry in 1997. In this book Hamid Dabashi examines the growing reputation of Iranian cinema from its origins in the films of Kimiyai and Mehrjui, through the work of established directors such as Kiarostami, Beyzai and Bani-Etemad, to young filmmakers like Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Qobadi, who triumphed at the Cannes 2000 festival. Dabashi combines exclusive interviews with directors, detailed and insightful commentary, critical cultural context, an extensive filmography, and generous illustration to provide an indispensable guide to a globally celebrated but little-studied cinematic genre. Book jacket.

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iranian society and culture underwent massive changes. Here, Khatereh Sheibani argues that cinema evolved after the national uprising in 1978/79, and ultimately replaced poetry as the dominant form of cultural expression. She presents a comparative analysis of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema as an offshoot of Iranian modernity, and explains its connections with the themes present in traditional Persian poetry and conventional visual arts. She examines the pre-revolutionary film industry - such as Iranian new wave and filmfarsi movies - its styles and themes, and its relation to the emerging cinema after 1978. Sheibani argues that Iranian art cinema, as one of the signifiers and agents of modernity, underwent a cultural revolution by employing the aesthetics of Persian literature and visual arts in a modern context. This is a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on Iranian cinema, politics and culture.

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran’s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republic’s system of modesty, had to ensure that women on-screen were veiled from the view of men. This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema. Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics.